NBN Wrap: What Happened With Australia's Broadband This Week?

This week, NBN Co released its quarterly results, and posted a $1.1 billion operating loss. Newly inducted CEO Bill Morrow says that the company needs to concentrate on educating and connecting consumers and businesses as well as building out the network, but things aren't exactly looking rosy for the future of the NBN.

According to Business Insider, at the end of March, 166,642 premises had connected to the NBN out of a possible 512,659 — that's only a one-third take up of the entire possible market. Obviously there are businesses and houses that don't need the NBN or that are stuck in existing contracts, but NBN Co really needs to lift its game to stay viable.

NBN Co and TPG are waging a war of words, and imminently a war of work, in rolling out fibre and delivering new high-speed connections to inner city apartments and office buildings around the country. It's really a race as to who can deliver connections to end users the fastest; TPG has been planning its own fibre network for some time, but NBN Co says it wants consumers to have access to as many retail service providers as possible by hooking up directly to the NBN.

Telstra's deal with NBN Co to buy out its copper network, and the ducts used to pull through fibre around neighbourhoods, could end up costing taxpayers up to $98 billion over the next 50 years. That's a lot of money, and that may just be why the current government wants to renegotiate its deal in light of the updated network online.

Delimiter says that Malcolm Turnbull lied to Triple J listeners when he bandied about numbers for the cost of building Labor's NBN model versus the Liberal multi-technology mix, skewing the figures by about $30 billion in the Libs' favour. This is the most recent iteration of the NBN, signed off by Turnbull and finance minister Mathias Cormann, that is proceeding without a cost-benefit analysis.

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